The great bug triage

I was very excited to learn at the Firefox Summit that Rob Strong was handing over ownership of the Extension Manager module to me. He did great work making the extension manager what it is today but has lately had to be more focused on Installer and windows integration issues.

Last week I spent a large part of my time trying to get myself up to speed on all the old filed bugs, clearing out things that clearly aren’t going to happen and trying to consolidate others. In particular I made the effort to go over every single unconfirmed bug and either resolve as appropriate or request any additional information from the reporter. It is rather sad that many of these were issues that noone commented in after the initial report or even worse the reporter responded with additional information but people (including me) dropped the ball and nothing further happened.

This big triage has been quite useful. Firstly the number of unconfirmed bugs for the add-ons manager has dropped from the mid 70s to under 30 (I would give you exact figures and pretty graphs but bugzilla’s charting is broken). I expect it to drop even further next week when I resolve the issues where the reporter is no longer responding to bugmail. Secondly it has allowed me to spot a pattern amongst 6 or so filed bugs which strongly suggests a new issue that can break add-on installations. While I have yet to be able to reproduce it in a test environment I certainly have more information to go on than previously.

Finally I have been marking all the trivial little issues that I think we could fix, but are unlikely to be priorities. These are the kinds of things that if you were interested in helping out and getting started in developing for Mozilla you could start out on. Many will end up being a few lines of patch, just need to figure out where to put it and test it.

So if you are interested in tackling any of these please give it a go. You can find me on IRC (for reasons best left alone I appear as Mossop) or by email if you need any guidance on getting started. I’m going to try to keep this list updated as I find new bugs that fit there, I still have yet to go through all of the 263 confirmed bugs, maybe a job for next week.